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Offenders wouldn't be supervised during strike, union warns

Thousands of offenders, including pedophiles and abusive partners, will roam the streets unsupervised if Ontario’s probation and parole officers go on strike, their union claims.

“There will be sex offenders on the loose, unsupervised, absolutely 100 per cent guaranteed,” Scott McIntyre, the probation and parole health and safety chair for the Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU), said Wednesday.

The risk of deaths at the hands of the worst offenders will increase as well, he warned.

“We know the likelihood of fatalities is high at any time, and it will increase substantially if there are not feet on the ground.”

During the 2002 OPSEU strike, also involving probation and parole officers, there were three high-profile homicides involving offenders who should have been under supervision, McIntyre said.

An increasing number of clients with increasingly complex problems, short-staffed workplaces and added responsibilities from the province have made the job challenging for probation and parole officers, he said.

“We run around with a box of bandages putting them on the files,” McIntyre said. “How in the heck are managers going to do the job? I don’t think it can be done.”

Ontario’s 6,000 corrections workers are set to go on strike Jan. 10, after more than a year of negotiations failed to bridge a large gap between wage offers and demands.

The spectre of a strike inside the province’s 28 jails and detention centres has received much of the media and public attention, largely because most of the OPSEU corrections members work there and the jails have been plagued for years by violence and overcrowding.

But Ontario residents should also be concerned about the impact of a strike by about 800 parole and probation officers that will force a relative handful of managers and support staff to supervise about 50,000 offenders, OPSEU warns.

“It is going to aggravate things everywhere,” she said. “A lot of people come to social services through the justice system. They need a lot of support.”

Parole and probation officers provide much of that support, she said.

“They do very important work.”

The province has plans in place to ensure offenders are properly supervised, Greg Flood, spokesperson for the Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services, said.

“In some areas, offices will be consolidated during a disruption, to maximize staffing resources. However, all offices will be staffed by experienced managers, all of whom have extensive experience as probation and parole officers,” he said in an e-mail.

“In some cases these managers will be supported by managers from elsewhere in the (public service). Supervision of offenders during a labour disruption will include enforcement of court-ordered conditions and offenders in breach of their legal obligations will be appropriately sanctioned.”

The probation and parole system in Ontario is already riddled with gaps in assessment and monitoring offenders, concluded a 2014 provincial auditor general’s report.

The report noted the rate of re-offending in Ontario overall had increased, and sat at about 42 per cent for medium-risk offenders and 60 per cent for high-risk offenders — more than half of the newly sentenced offenders in 2014.

Ontario has the highest number of offenders and lowest number of probation and parole officers in Canada, McIntyre said.

The Liberal government has added several responsibilities to officers in the past two years, such as more intensive assessments of sex and domestic violence offenders and more help for victims of crime, he said.

Those are valuable tasks, but there has been no hiring of extra frontline workers, McIntyre said.

But other jobs, such as random checks of sex offenders, have lapsed, he said.

“A strike is just going to aggravate things. The longer it goes on the worst it will get.”